Wedding chic just got affordable

Enlarge This Image

With my wedding more than a year away, I feel like it's way too soon to be shopping for a dress. Not that I haven't been looking. There's just so much that depends on the dress -- shoes, veil, accessories, bridesmaids' dresses, flowers, hair -- and even though I know what I should really be focusing on is the venue, particularly since we're planning on getting married in peak season, what I really want to do is look at gowns.

Since my massive stack of bridal magazines knows that's mostly what I want to do, they're all crammed full of ads and editorial features packed with photos of dresses. Once my fiancé shot down my desire to wear a green dress ("I don't want to have to explain to people that our wedding photos are wedding photos," he explained) and I got on board with wearing some variation on white (cream, ivory, eggshell...), I began to compile a folder of photos of dresses I like. Everyone I've spoken to says you don't really know what you want until you put it on, and lots of brides say they ended up falling in love with a dress they wouldn't usually have looked twice at, but I figure it can't hurt to have some idea of what I might like before I actually step into a bridal boutique.

Here's the problem: Every dress I've been able to picture myself wearing is Vera Wang. Not that there's anything wrong with Vera Wang; it's just that, if I'm wearing Vera Wang, we're going to be serving our guests saltines with Easy Cheese and plastic cups of Franzia in a public park because that's exactly how much budget we'll have left over after paying for the dress.

And then yesterday morning I logged in to my Google Reader, which was blowing up with the big fashion news of the day: Vera Wang is going to design a line for David's Bridal.

For the first time, I am actually excited about the fact that Anchorage has a David's Bridal.

If you're not familiar with David's Bridal -- first of all, what planet do you live on? It's kind of the Wal-Mart of bridal chains. If Wal-Mart did alterations and designer collaborations. OK, scratch that -- it's kind of the Target of bridal chains. At any rate, it's a somewhat more generic but often less expensive option to designer gowns.

It seems this is one of those cases in which "the economic downturn" stands to benefit the average American (or at least the average American bride). According to a post at The Cut, New York Magazine's style blog, Wang's label president agreed to partner with David's in part because some of the department stores that carry Wang's high-end bridal line have closed. Wang's gowns for David's will run between $600 and $1,500 -- still not chump change, but significantly more attainable than your average Vera Wang bridal gown (which can run up to about $25,000). Wang told Women's Wear Daily her David's line will use the same fabrics as her high-end creations.

Of course, a few commenters on The Cut immediately started complaining that "it will no longer be special to wear a Vera Wang bridal" and Wang is "bring(ing) bridezillas to the masses." Please. It's not like Vera Wang was personally hand-stitching all those gowns in her magical fantasyland sewing room.